U.S. Pat. No. 401,455 issued Apr. 16, 1889 discloses a hand operated printing machine having a flat type carrier mounted on a hand-lever assembly. The lever assembly allows the type carrier to be moved between two positions on a planar platen. In one position, the printing type is pressed against a pad which contains ink. Once the ink has been applied to the type, the lever assembly is activated to move the type to a second position in which the type is pressed against the article to be marked. The article is held against a platen by two clips. In order to change the imprint pattern, the type carrier must be replaced with one containing the new pattern.
A hand operated rubber stamp marking device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,013,007 issued on Mar. 22, 1977. This device has a printing unit with a number of bands each containing a set of type characters. A character on each band is selected by moving the band until the desired character is located at a marking location on the printing unit. By pressing on the handle of the machine, the printing unit is moved from an inking position to a stamping position where the printing unit is pressed against the article to be marked. Releasing the handle automatically returns the printing unit to its inking position.
In certain applications it is desirable to mark an article with alpha-numeric symbols. For example, the laundry of a nursing home or other institution may wish to stamp a patient's name on his articles of clothing to facilitate sorting the articles after laundering. In this application, the characters include the letters of the alphabet and decimal digits as well as special symbols. Previous hand held stamp machines are impractical for such application because of the size of the bands needed to accommodate all of the alpha-numeric characters, as well as the number of bands necessary to imprint an individual's entire name.